Cry Wolf (30 page)

“Hard to say,” Jack mused, easing her down on the boat's plank seat. He jammed a red USL Ragin' Cajuns baseball cap down on her head and stepped deftly over the seat to take up the push-pole at the stern. “Ol' Lucky Doucet, he used to be some kind of wild.”

He pushed off, and they moved away from the dock, the
pirogue
seeming to skate across the water, as graceful as a blade on ice. Laurel took a deep breath and willed herself to relax.

“Used to be?” Tipping the oversize cap back on her head, she twisted around to look at him. “Is he dead?”

“Naw, he's married. Got himself a beautiful wife, a little daughter, another baby on the way.”

“Busy man,” Laurel said dryly.

Happy man, Jack thought, sinking the fork of the push-pole into the muddy bottom and sending the
pirogue
gliding forward. A hard, hollow ball of longing lodged in his chest, taking up valuable air space, and he scowled and did his best to smash it with a mental mallet of self-punishment. He'd had his chance, and he'd blown it in the worst possible way. He didn't deserve another.

Pushing the dark thoughts from his mind, he turned his attention on Laurel and all the little puzzle pieces he had yet to find to complete his picture of her. She sat on the hard plank seat of the
pirogue
with the posture of a debutante, her gaze scanning the far bank of the bayou, where an alligator was sunning itself. Even in her baggy clothes and the too-big cap she looked feminine and graceful. He shook his head at that, a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

She wasn't his type. Not at all. These days he usually went for curvy, carefree girls with big breasts and uncomplicated brains, women who wanted nothing more from him than a good tussle between the sheets. He didn't know what Laurel Chandler would want. She claimed she wanted nothing from him, and yet he felt something about her drawing on him like a magnet. Instinct told him his curiosity could be dangerous, but the warning wasn't strong enough to overpower the attraction. Besides, he told himself smugly, he couldn't get in any deeper than he wanted to.

He piloted the
pirogue
to a favorite fishing hole, a place where willows shaded the banks, and bass, bream, and crappie cruised among the cypress stands and wallowed in the sluggish water edging the thickets of reeds and cattails. Laurel passed on the offer of a pole and instead pulled
Evil Illusions
out of the canvas tote bag she had brought with her. The morning passed to the trill of cicadas, the whine of a fishing reel, the splash of fish fighting against a future in a frying pan. Conversation became as sporadic and desultory as the breeze.

Laurel found the quiet soothing in the wake of Savannah's blowup. With an effort she pushed the questions about her sister's behavior to the back of her mind and tried to lose herself in the pages of Jack's book. Not a difficult thing to do. Despite his show as a simple Cajun boy, he was an excellent writer, talented, clever. He had the ability to pull the reader into the story as if through a portal into another dimension. The visual images were sharp, dark; the emotions so thick and electric, they left her skin tingling. The fear that built from paragraph to paragraph was almost unbearably intense. The sense of evil that overshadowed it all was at once subtle, insidious, and overwhelming.

Strong impressions from a man who claimed he didn't care much about anything that went on in the world around him except having a good time. No, she thought, watching as he cast gracefully toward the edge of a tangle of water hyacinth, these impressions, these dark fantasies didn't come from Jack the Party Animal. They came from the other Jack. The man with the burning gaze and the aura of danger. The man who stood silent and watchful behind the facade of the rogue.

“Where does it come from?” she asked as they spread a blanket on shore, preparing to have lunch.

“What?”

“What you write.”

Everything about him went utterly still for a split second, as if her question had literally stopped him cold. But he recovered so quickly, Laurel almost convinced herself she had imagined the response.

“It's just made up,” he said, smoothing a corner of the blue plaid blanket. “That's why they call it fiction, sugar.”

“I don't believe you just sit down, put your hands on a keyboard, and come up with that stuff.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's too good.”

He gave a dismissive shake of his head. “It's a talent, a trick, that's all.” Some trick, he thought bitterly. Just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein. Bleed out all the poison that simmered inside him.

Laurel knelt on the blanket, studying him with her head tilted on one side. “Some writers say it's like method acting. That they mentally live through every action and emotion.”

“And others will tell you it's like doing paint-by-numbers.”

“What do
you
say?”

“I say, I'm too damn hungry to play twenty questions,” he growled, stalking her across the blanket on his knees. A wicked smile played at the corners of his mouth and carved his dimples into his lean cheeks.

Nerve endings on red alert, Laurel held her ground as he approached. It seemed amazing to her, the way her body came alive and aware of him. Her heart picked up a beat, her breasts grew heavy and tingled with electricity.

“What's for lunch?” she asked breathlessly as he stopped before her, a scant inch of charged air separating them.

“You.”

He knocked the baseball cap from her head with a flick of his wrist. Then she was in his arms, immersed in his embrace, lost in his kiss. It occurred to her vaguely that he was trying to distract her from her line of questioning, but she couldn't bring herself to object to his method. His touch unleashed a host of needs that had lain dormant inside her until last night. Now they leaped and twisted, wild with the prospect of freedom.

Afterward they dozed exhausted, replete. Jack settled on his side with one leg thrown across Laurel's. She turned toward him and curled one small hand against his chest, too hot to cuddle, but needing to maintain contact with him. And they lay there in the quiet, in the heat, listening to the cicadas and the songbirds and the pounding of their own hearts.

A belated tremor of fear rumbled through Laurel. Fear of the control she had lost so completely. Fear of the incredible pleasure Jack had given her. An old fear that had its roots in a time of her life when she had seen sex as only a negative experience. She knew better now, but old fears never quite died—they just hid in dark corners of the mind and waited for the chance to slip out. Deliberately, she dismissed it and blinked her eyes open to look at Jack.

He lifted a hand and touched her cheek, idly brushing back a strand of hair. “Where'd you go,
'tite chatte
?” he whispered, his brows drawing together.

“Nowhere important,” she said, dodging his gaze.

“Back to Georgia?”

“No.”

“But you do go back there, in your mind,
oui
?”

She thought about that for a moment, debating the wisdom of revealing anything about that time in her life. A part of her wanted to guard the secrets, hide the past, protect herself. But it seemed ironic to try to hide anything from a man who had shared the most private parts of her body, who had taken her to dizzying heights of pleasure and held her safe in his arms as they floated together to earth. She had opened her body to him, now she opened another part of her, tentatively, hesitantly, feeling more vulnerable than a virgin.

“It comes to me sometimes,” she said at last. She sat up and began dressing, not wanting to feel any more naked than was necessary.

Jack hitched his jeans up and zipped them, leaving the button undone. “Can you talk about it?”

She shrugged, as if it were unimportant or easy, when it was far from being either. “I guess you read about it in the papers.”

“I read some of what the papers had to say, but I've been around the block a time or two, sugar. I know there's a helluva lot more to any story than sound bites and photo ops.”

Dressed, Laurel sat on the blanket with her arms wrapped around her knees and stared at the bayou. A squadron of wood ducks banked around in tight formation and came down with wings cupped and feet outstretched. They hit the water in unison and skied several feet, finally settling down to paddle away, chuckling among themselves.

“It started with three children and a story about a ‘club' that met once a week,” she began, bracing herself inwardly against what was to come. Even now, months after the case had been taken away from her, the details had the power to sicken her, the images came back as bright and ugly as ever. Her hands tightened against her shins until her knuckles turned white.

“The allegations were incredible. Child pornography. Sexual abuse. The children had been sworn to secrecy. Small animals had been slaughtered in front of them, killed and torn apart, as a demonstration of what might happen if they talked. But eventually they became more frightened of what might happen if they
didn't
talk.

“They came to me because I had been to their school during career week. I had talked about justice, about doing the right thing and fighting for the truth.” Her mouth twisted at the irony. “The poor little things believed me. I believed myself.”

She could still see them, all those little faces staring up at her from the floor of the gymnasium, their eyes round as they absorbed her sermon on the pride and nobility of working to see justice served. She could still feel that sense of pride and self-righteousness and naivete. She had still believed then that right would always win out if one worked hard enough, believed strongly enough, fought with a pure heart.

“Nobody wanted me to touch their story. The adults they were accusing were above reproach. A teacher, a dentist, a member of the Methodist church council. Fine, upstanding citizens—who just happened to be pedophiles,” she said bitterly.

“What made you believe them?”

How could she explain? How could she describe the sense of empathy? She knew what it was to hold a terrible secret inside, because she had held one of her own. She knew what courage it took to let the secret out, because she had never been able to muster it.

The guilt twisted like a knife inside her, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the pain. She had never found the strength to brave her mother's unpredictable temperament or risk her mother's love.

“Don't tell Mama, Laurel. She won't believe you. She'll hate you for telling. She'll have one of her spells, and it will be all your fault.”

If she hadn't been such a coward, if she had done the right thing, the brave thing . . .

A picture of Savannah swam before her eyes, rumpled, seductive, playing the harlot with a tragic sense of reckless desperation underlying her sexuality.

She pushed to her feet and walked down to the edge of the water, wanting to escape not only Jack and his questions, but her past, herself. He followed her. She could sense him behind her, feel his dark gaze on her back.

“Why did you believe them, Laurel?”

“Because they needed me. They needed justice. It was my job.”

The denial of her own feelings built a sense of pressure in her chest that grew and grew, like an inflating balloon. It crowded against her lungs, squeezed her heart, closed off her throat, pushed hard on the backs of her eyes. She had crushed it out before, time and again. She had railed at Dr. Pritchard for trying to make her let it out.

“I wasn't atoning for anything. I had a job to do, and I did it. My childhood had nothing to do with it.”

He just gave her that long, patient look that held both pity and disappointment. And she wanted to pick up one of the fat psychology books from his desk and hit him in the face with it.

“I didn't come here to talk about ancient history. I want help for what's happening now.”

“Don't you see, Laurel? The past is what this is all about. You wouldn't be where you are today if not for where you started and what went on there.”

“I'm not trying to atone for anything!”

She tried to suck in a breath, but her lungs couldn't expand to accommodate the humid air. The pressure was so great, she wondered wildly if she would simply explode.

Control. She needed control.

Ruthlessly, she tried to push aside the other thoughts and concentrate on simply relating the facts in a way that would satisfy Jack and keep her emotional involvement to a minimum.

“We worked day and night to build a case. There was evidence, but none of it could be tied directly to the accused. And the whole time, they were soliciting sympathy in the community, claiming to be the victims of a witch hunt, claiming that I was trying to climb on their backs to the state attorney general's office.” Her hands balled into tight fists at her sides as she tried to leash the fury building inside her. Her whole body trembled with the power of it. “God, they were so slick, so clever, so smug!”

So evil.

You believe in evil, don't you, Laurel?

She clenched her teeth against the need to scream.

. . . and good must triumph over evil . . .

“All we really had was the testimony of the children.”

She snatched half a breath, feeling as if her lungs would burst.

“Children aren't considered reliable witnesses.”

Don't bother telling, Laurel. No one will believe you.

“Parker—the state AG—” She was gasping now, as if she had run too far too fast. A fine sheen of sweat coated her skin, sticky and cold. “He took the case away from me—It—was politically explosive—He said I—I—couldn't handle it—”

Jack stepped closer, his heart pounding with hers,
for
her. He could feel the tension, brittle in the air around her, snapping with electricity. He reached out to lay a hand on her shoulder, and she jolted as if he had given her a shock.

“You did the best you could,” he said softly.

“I lost,” she whispered, the words lashing out of her like the crack of a whip, the anguish almost palpable. Shaking violently, she raised her fists and pressed them hard against her temples. “They were guilty.”